Hermeticism

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I have prepared a transcription of the whole interview, which you will find below. Some automation was used in producing this transcription, so I apologize for any inconsistencies that may be present.

The Interview

Host: This episode, I'm joined once again by writer and occultist John Michael Greer to discuss the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, along with a general discussion on esoteric groups throughout history. I'd like to say a big thank you to my paying patrons and subscribers for making all of this work possible. If you'd like to support the podcast and keep it running, please find the links in the description below. Otherwise, please enjoy.

So, John Michael Greer, thanks once again for joining me on this podcast.

John Michael Greer: Thank you for having me on.

Host: We are going to be discussing, probably for half of this conversation, a group called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It's the most well-known and influential esoteric order of modern occultism, founded in—let me just get my dates right—1887, by William Robert Woodman, William Wescott, and Samuel Liddell Mathers. I don't want to dive too deep into the lineage and origins of the Golden Dawn just yet because that can be esoterically tricky. What I realized, because you mentioned this book by Ellic Howe about the history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, is that there's a huge discussion, and a huge assumption—maybe something that's just given in esotericism, and possibly even in religions—that for those who know, the history is there the whole time. But perhaps, because it’s foundational, it's not always seen as a priority or a primary focus. I'm talking about groups—people coming together as a community under a leader, or a few leaders, a teacher, or a guru. I was thinking, day one of the history of Western esotericism really is a textual history. We have Pythagoras with his students, so from the beginning, we have groups. What is it about groups that is needed and natural within esotericism for them to form, do you think?

John Michael Greer: Well, it seems very simple to me. We can start with Pythagoras as a great example. Here's this guy who went to Egypt from the Greek world, managed to get his way into an Egyptian temple—very late in the history of Egypt's independence—and learned things that a lot of people in the Greek world did not know. Then, after he finished his training, he returned to the Greek world, settled in Crotona in the Greek colonial communities in what's now Italy, and said, "Oh, by the way, I have some stuff I'm willing to teach." So, what happened? A bunch of people showed up to learn from him. That's where you get a group.

Host: Do you think truth brings people together?

John Michael Greer: Well, I don't know if it's truth, but it's certainly curiosity. It's information, wanting to know something other than the generic stuff you would get growing up in a Greek society or any other society. The thing that esoteric traditions have to offer is something new, or maybe something old but unfamiliar. It's not just what you learned in Sunday school. So inevitably, whether we're talking about Pythagoras, Jesus of Nazareth, William Wescott, Dion Fortune, or anyone else, you have somebody with something to teach, something to offer. And other people are going to say, "Ooh, can I sit and listen? Will you tell me what you know? Will you give me some instructions?" Thus, the group is born. It's inevitable because, for the simple reason that there’s a tendency in some aspects of modern pop-cultural occultism to claim, "Well, you already know deep inside yourself all that you need to know." That is an excuse for fatal ignorance because, no, you don’t. There are people who know more than you do, people who've been doing this for a long time, who learned from others who also practiced for a long time. There are traditions, teachings, systems—you can learn them. You don’t already know them, and you might actually benefit from them. And so, again, groups become essential, unless you want to do it entirely on a one-on-one basis, but that tends to be time-intensive. So, pretty soon, yes, you end up with Pythagoras, Dion Fortune, or whoever, sitting there with a circle of people gathered around, going, "Now, what was that?" There's your group.

Host: It’s interesting you mentioned Jesus of Nazareth there. It's actually a fairly good example of the very early Christian Church, particularly during catechesis. There was a point in the mass where everyone could attend, and then, at a certain point—this is in very early Christianity, not now—a quite literal hermetic seal was put in place. Those who hadn’t gone through catechesis were asked to leave before the consumption of the host. So, the question I have is, what’s the difference between closing the door, allowing only certain people, and the distinction between a group and an esoteric group?

John Michael Greer: What you're asking about is the nature of initiation. In at least some of their documents, Christians still refer to the process where a person comes to be baptized for the first time as Christian initiation. The ceremony of baptism is the central initiatory rite, and you find equivalents throughout the ancient world. The Christian tradition's dependence on the old Mysteries is not small. If you’ve been through the initiation ritual, certain things are transmitted to you. I'm not talking about information; you get all the information during catechism classes, you learn what you're supposed to learn, and undergo various modes of preparation. Then, there’s a ceremony. Our culture often insists that all ceremonies are just empty forms and that nothing real can be communicated, but that’s simply the bias of our time. In fact, something is transmitted if the person performing the ceremony knows what they're doing and has the spiritual connection to make it possible. Something non-rational, transrational, is communicated that adds a further dimension to the experience. You've gone from being on the outside to being on the inside, and setting things up so that only those on the inside can attend certain ceremonies makes perfect sense in that context.

Host: A sort of loaded question: Is all initiation self-initiation?

John Michael Greer: No, self-initiation is not always sufficient, though it’s necessary. Let's imagine you're going to be baptized or you've applied to become a member of a lodge of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and are preparing for your neophyte grade. There are certain preparations, and then you go through the ceremony, whether it’s baptism or the neophyte initiation. After that, you have work to do. In the Christian context, this involves participating in the sacraments and the sacramental life of the church. In the Golden Dawn, it involves studying the first knowledge lecture and practicing rituals like the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. If you don't do the work, the initiation doesn't matter. Sure, you get that transmission, but it won't stick unless you work to keep it in place. Now, can you get to the same place without the ceremony? Yes, but it's not easy. The ceremony transmits that influence to give you a boost. I can’t speak to baptism, as I've never been baptized, but in the Golden Dawn system, I studied for many years before becoming a member of a Golden Dawn Temple. I did the necessary work to self-initiate in that tradition. When I became a member, it wasn’t a matter of, "Wow, here’s something completely new." It was more like, "Okay, I know this stuff; I’ve felt this energy before." It was a more diffuse experience over a period of self-initiatory work. So, it's not true that all initiation is self-initiation, but all initiation must be combined with personal effort. You don't have to go through the formal ceremony to reach certain levels of spiritual development, but it can help significantly.

Host: So, just to stay within this realm of groups generally, but focusing on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, what is it that groups can achieve that individuals can’t?

John Michael Greer: Very little, but we are social primates. We like to interact in groups, hang around with others who share our interests and concerns. You can do it yourself, but it will be slower. It will take a lot of personal work, and you'll probably make mistakes that you’ll need to correct over time. At this point, especially with all the relevant material published, you can do it all yourself, but it does get lonely. What you get from groups isn't that you have to belong to a specific group to achieve a certain level of spiritual development. It's that you gain the advantage of competent instruction and mutual support from other practitioners. You also get the social benefits of hanging out with people who share your interests. It’s a lot less lonely.

Host: Let’s talk about the most controversial aspect of groups—leaders, chiefs, gurus. You've been an archdruid in your time.

John Michael Greer: I have. I did 12 years as Grand Archdruid.

Host: Grand Archdruid, yes. That’s not a title you came up with, right?

John Michael Greer: No, I thought it was rather silly, but it's the traditional title: Grand Archdruid of the Grand Grove of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. That, and $3.50, will get you a cup of coffee. Again, we’re social primates; we like fancy titles. We like to say, "I'm the Grand Panjandrum," or whatever, and it's really rather silly.

Host: I think there's something to be said for tradition. My question was really about what makes the notion of a leader, in groups like the Golden Dawn, vital. Otherwise, you often end up in chaos. What's the difference between a good and a bad leader?

John Michael Greer: How many volumes of social psychology and leadership theory do you want to study? They still argue about what we can simply know by practice. A good leader minimizes quarreling and maximizes the amount of work that gets done. The Golden Dawn had a mixed record with that. Dion Fortune is a great example—she was able to pull together a group, make it function, and keep it going at a fairly intense pace for most of her adult life. It accomplished a great deal. The Golden Dawn had its leadership issues. Of the three founders you mentioned—Woodman, Westcott, and Mathers—Woodman was elderly and didn’t last long. Westcott was edged out at a certain point, and Mathers wasn’t a very good leader. He was very focused on how important he was and how everyone had to be loyal to him. This attitude led to a rebellion against him, and the Golden Dawn blew itself to smithereens. It was founded in 1887 and collapsed irrevocably in 1903. That’s only 16 years, not a very long history. Mathers was brilliant, a capable occultist, and a competent teacher, but he wasn’t good at managing the clash of egos in an organization like the Golden Dawn, and so it blew up.

Host: Before we get into the nitty-gritty with the Golden Dawn, why are we talking about them?

John Michael Greer: I think you’ve already settled that. It is, by far, the most famous and most influential of modern occult organizations in the English-speaking world, in that 16 years of life, the core members of the Golden Dawn created what is still the most exhaustively complete system of ceremonial magic in existence—a system that even those who claim to be dedicated Golden Dawn practitioners have rarely worked through in full. It appeared at the right time, just as the Theosophical Society was developing a market for public occultism in the Western world. Many influential esoteric groups in Britain, the United States, and several other parts of the world came straight out of it. Whether we talk about Dion Fortune in the UK, Paul Foster Case in the US, or any of half a dozen others, it was enormously influential. Its offshoots and the people it inspired—whether for good or ill—made a significant mark on the world. What all of these people learned from the Golden Dawn was a very important part of that.

Host: Now we get into a classic trope with individual esotericists. We see it with Blavatsky, with Gurdjieff—he had the same thing. He says, "I found these scrolls in the desert." Well, where exactly? Or Blavatsky with the Masters.

John Michael Greer: Oh yes, yes. Where she’s sitting there, picking telepathic messages out of the air.

Host: Exactly. Or Rudolf Steiner with the Akashic record— “I can just do this thing no one else can.” But anyway, you know what I’m going to mention. The cipher manuscript—was it a hoax?

John Michael Greer: Let me be precise. The cipher manuscripts are handwritten and do exist. Copies of them are readily available these days. The originals, including apparently the original set, are written in a handwriting and drawn in a style that appears to be the same as that of—oh, I’m going to forget his name now—one of the important occultists of the generation immediately before the Golden Dawn. He was Kenneth Mackenzie. Yes, Mackenzie. I just had to wrestle with my memory to get his name. The drawings, in particular, are done in an identical style to those Mackenzie had for an old Oddfellows ritual that he had in his collection, which I actually published a version of years back. So, probably wherever it came from originally, the cipher manuscript was in Mackenzie’s hands. It may have been his idea, but it ended up in the hands of Westcott. Westcott manufactured a very fine colorful late 19th-century sort of occult fiction story about a mysterious German adept, Fräulein Anna Sprengel, who conveniently left her contact information in this cipher manuscript. Westcott contacted her and immediately received, sight unseen, authorization to open a Golden Dawn temple in England. Suddenly, Westcott, Mathers, and Woodman were secret chiefs, and away we go. Of course, the trope of finding a mysterious manuscript in a bookstall was all over the potboiler occult literature of the time. I think one of Marie Corelli’s books even makes use of it. I know that a very similar theme is all over Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni. It was absolutely standard. So, I really question whether anyone even believed it at the time because it’s so obvious—like if someone were to claim that a flying saucer had descended and handed them mysterious silver scrolls. Everyone would be going, “Yeah, right.”

Host: But with that obviousness, which I think is apparent with many other esotericists, as I mentioned, there’s this sort of charisma that carries it on. Do you think there’s a collective need for something to be involved with? We want it to be interesting, but we also need that initial mystery. We can't fully accept that we’ve created it out of whole cloth because then we’d be able to look at the code, so to speak. We need some sort of drama to suspend—not necessarily disbelief—but to feel that it isn’t really just us.

John Michael Greer: I think your concept of suspending disbelief is very appropriate. At that time, many of these same people belonged to various fraternal orders with their own typically bogus origin stories. I hope it won’t shock any of my fellow Masons out there, but Freemasonry does not actually descend from King Solomon’s Temple. There’s this whole story about how this tradition comes from King Solomon’s Temple, but very clearly, that’s not what happened. It’s a builder’s guild from the Late Middle Ages that’s been reworked for new purposes, and so on. Of course, there were plenty of orders circulating at the same time that didn’t even have that much of a claim. I’ll hold the Druid orders, which were very active in Britain in the late 19th century, as a great example. Not one of them had the least connection to the ancient Druids. In many cases, it was very clear. One order, whose old ritual I happen to have read in detail, claimed to have been founded by an ancient, wise Druid named Togodubeline. Well, that’s what happens when you take the name of Togodumnus, a Celt who shows up in Caesar’s writings, and combine it with the name of Cymbeline, a character from Shakespeare. If this sounds bogus, I’m sure it did even more so back when everyone knew Caesar and Shakespeare. Yet, they had this whole business about Togodubeline, the great Druid. Suspension of disbelief doesn’t mean blind credulity. It means we’re going to play with this, have fun with it, and accept it as the ground rule for the game we’re playing. If there’s something useful involved—whether it’s a Druid order that does charitable work or a Golden Dawn that has valuable occult teachings—then let’s have fun.

Host: That’s exactly what I was about to say. On a surface, phenomenal level, we can deconstruct it, say how bogus it is, analyze the manuscripts, and do the handwriting analysis. It’s obviously just this. On another level—and I think the Druid example is key—there’s still a connection to something else. As you like to say, these manuscripts have a vibe.

John Michael Greer: The Druid Revival took off because people found that playing the game, putting on the silly white robes, and going down to Stonehenge does something—it connects them somehow. This is something people still experience, not necessarily all at Stonehenge. In the same way, people got involved in the Golden Dawn. They were used to canned origin stories; everybody has one. But then they got the knowledge. They went through the ceremonies and thought, “Wow, okay, there’s a lot of depth here.” They got their knowledge lectures, went through further degrees, and were asked to demonstrate proficiency in various areas. It became clear that while there’s a game, it’s not just a game—or if you will, it’s a game played very seriously. The alchemists were very into that. Michael Maier, a very important German alchemist in the early 17th century, wrote books with titles like Lusus Serius (A Serious Game) or Jocus Severus (A Severe Joke), where he included really silly stories. If I recall correctly, Lusus Serius is this long debate among the birds about who will be the king, with the owl taking one role and various others involved. It’s quite funny, but there’s a lot of alchemical tradition and insightful material—both physical and spiritual alchemy—passed on through this silly narrative about birds. So, the game can be a vehicle for something useful, even powerful. Yes, one can play the deconstructive role, but...Okay, you've deconstructed it—now put it back together again. You know, we ask someone to do that with a clock, and you'll have an interesting experience on your hands.

Host: I’m going to assume it was the crow that became the king of the birds.

John Michael Greer: It has been long enough since I read that piece of Maier’s work that I don’t remember who became the king of the birds.

Host: Damn, I’ll have to find it out. It sounds like it’s worth checking.

John Michael Greer: I wonder if it was the wren because the wren very often ended up as the king of the birds.

Host: Okay, back to these manuscripts—they are full to the brim with Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy—the grab bag of everything, really. So, what makes the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as they are organizing and structuring things, not just a simple collection of all these things they found? Look, I think—and I mean this in no cynical terms, but in a positive sense—when I say it, the history of occultism is a history of inventive plagiarism.

John Michael Greer: Absolutely.

Host: What makes this sort of collation of all these things more than just someone saying, “We’ve just put a load of things together”?

John Michael Greer: First of all, there's the old joke, “copy from one person, it’s plagiarism; copy from ten, it’s research; copy from a hundred, it’s genius.” The Golden Dawn copied from hundreds. Mathers, in particular, had a small income, and he spent all his time in the British Library going through reams of old occult literature. He had a solid knowledge of the subject. Westcott was a lifelong occultist, and those two, in particular, along with others as the order got going, had probably half the top occult talent in England at the time meeting at the Isis-Urania Lodge. They worked like beavers to create a synthesis of magical tradition—very inspired plagiarism in their case. The second thing is they also practiced it. It’s one thing to come up with a neat collation of documents; it’s another to say, “Okay, I’m going to do these rituals for a year and see what happens.” When you actually do the work, test it, adapt it, and refine it, you get a lot out of that. They also had the advantage, in terms of ritual work, that William Westcott was an extremely experienced Freemason. He was involved in the Lodge of Emulation, the main London lodge that taught Masons how to do ritual. Westcott was heavily involved in that, so he was simply an expert ritualist. He could review the various draft rituals, both the solitary and the lodge rituals, and suggest improvements. You end up with rituals that are dramatic and functional, if rather fussy. So, all of this comes together to make the Golden Dawn a brilliant collation and, in fact, a summary of an immense amount of the total body of Western esotericism—more, I think, than anybody else has put together into a single system.

Host: Because, you know, this notion of doing the work is key—though people always want to ignore it. “Which book should I read? Which book should I read?” Well, what about the one where you actually do it?

John Michael Greer: (Laughs)

Host: That brings to mind a question we probably should have brought up earlier. We’re talking late 19th century here. What was the occult atmosphere like at the time? Was there anything remotely like this around—any coherent, structured groups besides Freemasons? Was there anything new, any upcoming groups?

John Michael Greer: Okay, it was a bubbling cauldron of new groups. We had Freemasonry, of course, and various Masons were all saying, “This is very well and good, but let’s do something a little more esoteric, a little more occult.” In France, you could get away with almost anything because they didn’t have a coherent Grand Lodge structure. In England, you had to keep the Grand Lodge from getting too upset, but there was a lot of room within the Masonic community to tinker with things. There were a lot of slightly older traditions being brought over. You had stuff going on in Paris, which was an even hotter bed of occultism at the time. Various organizations were being founded, lodges, temples, and societies organized to do this kind of ritual work—each coming up with some of their own. McKenzie, who I mentioned earlier, was involved in several of these. Westcott, of course, had his fingers in every esoteric pie in England. So, you had all these organizations... One such organization was Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, founded in 1868 by Masons interested in Rosicrucian symbolism. It had its own system of initiation, somewhat similar to the Golden Dawn system, though it lacked the practical dimension. This was really a test bed because Mathers and Westcott were both heavily involved in it. They had a clear sense of what could be done with initiation rituals in that setting. They decided to take something outside the Masonic setting, open it to women as well as men, to non-Masons as well as Masons, and include practical work. Once they did that, people from other groups were intrigued because many of those groups lacked practical work. This was partly due to Theosophy. The Theosophical Society was focused on occult theory, and they thought it was great for everyone to sit and read vast amounts of literature and meditate. Blavatsky herself was very down on occult practice, and her successors continued this trend. As a result, many organizations tiptoed into practice. The Heretic Brotherhood of Luxor, for example, was deeply into practical work but crashed and burned in the early 1870s. Then came the Golden Dawn, a semi-secret organization passing on serious practical stuff. This created a stampede to join, attracting many who had experience with other practices. This is why the Golden Dawn took off the way it did.

Host: Was the Golden Dawn known to the public at the time, or was it more of a niche interest?

John Michael Greer: It was more of a niche interest. To know about it, you either had to be well-connected or pay close attention to small notes in publications like Notes and Queries. Generally, you had to know someone. The occult community in England was small, so if you were involved in occultism, you probably belonged to the local Theosophical group and attended lectures. You might have learned about the Golden Dawn through conversations with people you met at these events.

Host: Considering the eventual decline in interest in Theosophy, do you think the decline contributed to the rise of organizations like the Golden Dawn?

John Michael Greer: The decline in interest in Theosophy was not directly related to the rise of the Golden Dawn. There were always people who enjoyed reading about occultism but were not interested in practical work. Theosophy's death was more of a self-inflicted wound. I mean, we can get into the story, but it destroyed itself very efficiently. I hope it can manage to recover at some point, but it's been creeping along in a very small way ever since. Do you want me to cover the story?

Host: We can add it in. I think maybe it's around the same level; if you were to pick the two most influential groups in the English-speaking world, these are the two: the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn.

John Michael Greer: After Blavatsky died, power in the Theosophical Society transferred to Annie Besant. She was nothing like a skillful manager, politician, or organizer as Blavatsky had been. There were quarrels, and various people started splitting off and doing their own things. Not least because Besant was very much into protecting people she favored, including Charles Leadbeater, who had a problem with young boys. When that came out, Besant covered for him. That’s when Steiner split off and took half of European theosophy with him. That was when Mead split off and formed the Quest Society, and when William Quan Judge split off to form his rival, the Theosophical Society (American Section). As the 1920s built on, Besant became convinced that Jiddu Krishnamurti, the son of a servant at the Theosophical headquarters outside of Mumbai, was the Messiah, the next World Teacher. She had him raised with extensive training. In 1929, in the United States, as I recall, they had a grand meeting of the Order of the Star in the East, the organization Besant had founded to support Krishnamurti's claims to messiahship. Krishnamurti, in an act of impressive personal courage, stood before this immense worshiping crowd and said, "You're wrong. I'm not here to teach you. You can't learn anything that matters from anyone but yourself. Truth is a pathless land. I dissolve the Order of the Star in the East. I renounce any claim to Messiahhood. Go away." This fiasco caused an enormous drop-off in interest in Theosophy because Besant and the organization had piled so much credibility onto their claims. Shortly thereafter, within a couple of months, the stock market collapsed. Theosophy had a very substantial upper-middle-class membership, and many of its members were heavily invested in the market. When they lost everything, the Order suffered immense financial losses, and a huge number of people quit. They never got over it. So, the morals of the story are: First, if you're going to promote someone as the Messiah, make sure they'll go along with it. Second, don't make yourself dependent on the financial stability of a class of crazed speculators when the market is at an all-time high. I offer this for anyone interested in founding a movement—just keep those points in mind.

Host: Now, on to a related topic - schisms. This is something I wanted to bring up earlier. It also happens in the Order of the Golden Dawn. I noticed there's one Orthodox order, similar to the "Life of Brian" scenario…

John Michael Greer: Ah yes, the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea, the Popular Judean Front, etc. We do it in Druidry as well. The Ancient Order of Druids in America is unrelated to the Ancient Order of Druids, and neither has anything to do with the Ancient Druid Order. I'm not making this up.

Host: I think every single esoteric or spiritual group that reaches a sufficient size or has a long enough history usually experiences splits, especially if there is a guru, such as Gurdjieff or Blavatsky. These splits often occur after the guru's death. I’ve never seen a significant split occur prior. These schisms are often due to charismatic infighting, but there can be other reasons as well?

John Michael Greer: It really varies from case to case. There are many good reasons for schisms, as well as many bad ones. If a charismatic leader, whom everyone accepts, dies without having chosen an equally charismatic successor, schisms are almost certain. Various individuals will vie for leadership, leading to conflict. Honest differences of opinion also arise; by the time the charismatic leader dies, there are often people who disagree on the direction the group should take, leading to schisms over doctrinal issues. For example, the Golden Dawn originally blew itself into three factions in 1903, with these factions eventually fragmenting further until they gradually disbanded. In the 1970s, a cheap, readily available edition of Regardie’s "The Golden Dawn" led to the formation of numerous new Golden Dawn orders. Many of these claimed bogus inheritances from the original order or invented secret chiefs. Regardless of the official connection or origin story, the rituals worked, leading to various independent Golden Dawn groups. I see it as healthy because it keeps the disfunctions of one leader from tainting the whole organization.

Host: To stick with the Golden Dawn and get into the nitty-gritty: My question is about your first book, Inside a Magical Lodge. Since you have a long history with the Golden Dawn, perhaps you can give us a brief overview. Of course, I don't expect you to reveal the great secrets of the Secret Chiefs, whom you've met, but opening doors to a Golden Dawn lodge and stepping inside is really the question on many people's minds. What is it like? What's the atmosphere?

John Michael Greer: OK, I'm going to take you up on the offer and give a very brief rundown of my own experience with the Golden Dawn. This will give some idea of how this happened. I didn’t get involved with the Golden Dawn as an organization until quite late in my career. I got involved with it as a tradition. I first learned about it from books starting in the winter of 1976-1977. I picked up a cheap paperback copy of Techniques of High Magic by Francis King and Stephen Skinner in a department store in Seattle, Washington. I thought I’d found the Holy Grail. I was a kid at the time.

Host: To start with Stephen Skinner's book was not too bad.

John Michael Greer: It was the best introductory book available at that time. There are other books, including some of mine, that have built on it and gone further, but it was a great place to start. I also had W. Butler's book The Magician his Training and Work and a few other things. This was all I had to go on. I was amazed by this discovery. At the time, I was around 14 or 15 years old. The Golden Dawn magic was almost all that was available in the U.S. during that period. People talk about the British Invasion in music, with various British bands coming over in the wake of The Beatles. We had a British Invasion in occultism also. There was a period in the latter part of the 20th century when if it wasn’t the Golden Dawn, Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley, or Gerald Gardner’s version of Wicca - it didn’t exist. The generic American idea was that magic came from England. Wicca never really interested me at all. I read some of Aleister Crowley's works, chuckled, and returned them to the library. The Golden Dawn, however, was of interest, and that’s what I focused on. Over the years, I gradually built up a fair collection of Golden Dawn and Dion Fortune material. Years later, after publishing two…no, four books. I first contacted anyone practicing Golden Dawn magic outside my local circle in Seattle. This was over 20 years after I had originally encountered the material. I had done an enormous amount of work with it. I gradually discovered that there was indeed a whole world of people practicing Golden Dawn magic, with varying results. Eventually, I went through various Golden Dawn degrees and other practices. It's very difficult to explain the atmosphere of an esoteric lodge to someone who hasn’t been in one. It’s a very odd state. It’s not particularly spooky—there are no tentacles rising up or Satan and his minion gathering with flapping leathery wings. There’s a sense of being in two places at once. One place is a dusty rental hall, you can tell the Golden Dawn is a Victorian system, full of clutter and knickknacks. Many groups that spun off from the Golden Dawn decreased the amount of hardware. To some degree you have handmade stuff, the hand painted this and inexpensive cotton that. On the physical level, it has a school pageant quality. However, while you're at work, there is a sense of something else, something more complete, more gorgeous, and more real trying to come through.

It's as though you were at some kind of Tolkien fan convention, with everyone dressed up as Hobbits, elves, or soldiers of Gondor. All the while, there's an unnerving sense that Gandalf might actually be in the room somewhere— the real Gandalf, not just someone in costume. It feels like something real is trying to be born, which, if everything works right, can come through with enough power to change your life. That’s probably the best way I can describe being inside a magical lodge. The quality of the knickknacks and the decor doesn’t actually make much difference. You could be working with cardboard cutouts, and if everyone is truly concentrating and doing the inner work, you’re in a place not made with hands. There are angelic powers in the four quarters, and it really starts to hum. However, you can’t guarantee that this will happen. A good temple or lodge will achieve this far more often, but you're trying to bring the non-physical into the physical, the unseen into the seen, and spiritual energies into material manifestation. At least, that's the goal—to initiate someone and assist them in rising to a higher level of consciousness.

Host: What is it to respect that? That’s the question of the day regarding why some religions are just…you know, I get annoyed at myself, because technically it is my heritage, but when I look at the Church of England, there’s nothing there. And the question is of the respect for the sacred. And it’s a big question. As you said, being in two places at once—in a dusty church hall, a town hall, or elsewhere—something else is happening. And it comes from a certain respect.

John Michael Greer: That’s part of it. You have to be open to the idea that his other thing is trying to come through. If we consider the Church of England or most mainstream churches in the United States, the problem often lies in the education they get. They get an ordinary university education that is agnostic and aspiritual, lacking training in prayer, contemplation, and other tools used in a religious setting to bring through that sense of the other. In fact, such practices are often discouraged. The focus tends to be on being functionaries or bureaucrats who simply go through the little ceremonies on Sunday. It's really sad because those same ceremonies can be used to bring a tremendous amount of power. If you read about power, energy, or life force, it's not just a superficial concept. These forces bring the world into being. There is a great passage in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, where one of the characters has a religions experience. It occurs to her in that moment that all this while she thought of spirit as a meek, well-behaved thing you float up to like a vapor, and what is she is experiencing is strong hands reaching down to make or destroy. And so, we have far too many people, who if they understand that there’s anything spiritual, they think it’s a meek, well-behaved thing you float up to like a vapor, that it might be powerful, alive, and have its own will, intentions, and purpose with which you are expected to align yourself as the price of participating in it. This is not something you typically find in the training of modern Church of England pastors.

Host: With regards to participation… in the Golden Dawn curriculum what does it look like?

John Michael Greer: After completing the Neophyte ceremony, you might feel dazed and confused. An officer of the temple will instruct you on your next steps. You’ll receive papers with instructions to set aside half an hour a day for a simple ritual, such as the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, followed by meditation and learning how to do divination. It is a practice to develop your intuition, and, oh yes, here's a bunch of stuff you also have to study. If you do that—and some people do, I should say—because normally at least half of the people who come in this way go out the same door they came in. They have had a ceremony but are not interested in doing the work and are not willing to commit, so they drift right back out again. But let’s assume you're not one of those people; that you are genuinely moved by a desire to experience magic. You are willing to set aside half an hour a day, perhaps setting the alarm a little earlier each morning to get up and do your practices. You would then go through another initiation ritual a month later. Here’s another packet: you’re still doing the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram and meditation. Here is some new material to meditate on and additional things to study. Rinse and repeat as you progress through the different grades. Each time, you're getting more symbols, more material to study, and more things to meditate on. The practices begin to expand. At a certain point, you receive expansions to the pentagram ritual. Then comes the day—at least two years after you start—when you receive the Adeptus Minor grade, the first of the Inner Order grades. That ceremony is a four-alarm fire: extremely complicated, intricate, and gorgeous. After that, the Praemonstrator, or actually at that point, the Chief Adept because it's the Inner Order, sits you down and says, "Well, now you've done all the preliminary stuff." Then out comes a notebook about three inches thick. This is for you to work through at your own pace. You open it and find it packed to the bursting point with formulas for practical magic, divination, clairvoyance, and all kinds of other co-practices. But you're no longer being spoon-fed; you've been spoon-fed through the various degrees. “And, by the way, would you mind training so you can start taking part in performing this or that ritual? We’d like you to memorize these lines,” and away we go. What’s happening to you through those stages? Well, that depends because this is not like interchangeable parts going through a factory; these are human souls we’re dealing with, and every one of them is different. Broadly speaking, you are developing will and imagination. Instead of drifting through life, you reach the point of realizing that you can choose what you want in life and make things happen. There are ways to achieve this that are not necessarily obvious or visible or dependent on strict materialism. You’re developing your capacity to perceive things, even if they don’t fit within a narrow materialistic view. You’re learning to perceive and sense the unseen. You’re developing your imagination. We often dismiss imagination, “oh, it’s just imaginary,” but it is the single most important power we have as human beings. We literally construct the world we live in by using our imagination to piece together sensory data. We do it so quickly that we often don’t notice when we’ve woven in misjudgments, emotional hang-ups, and burdensome feelings from childhood. That’s why our lives suck. When you master your imagination, will, intuitive perceptions, and other magical practices, you can change this. You can stop treating every interaction with a person as if that person is going to bully you, even if that has been your experience since childhood. “Since I was three years old, I've been doing that, and, you know, all these kinds of bad problems have been happening. Okay, I'm going to stop,” and away we go. So that's the kind of thing that can happen. The Golden Dawn is fairly high intensity, and one problem with any high-intensity training program is that it can also lead to failures. On one hand, you have people who enter the system and, when faced with something that convinces them it’s real, run quickly.

Host: This is a good thing because it means they’ve realized the seriousness of the practice.

John Michael Greer: But the thing is, if they were brought into it more gently, they would be saying, "Oh, this is real," and then you calm them down, give them a cup of tea, and talk through it. Eventually, if you're doing it more gently, they aren't necessarily going to panic. The other kind of failure, which is disastrous, occurs when all this stuff can go to your head and feed your ego. A certain number of people who go through the Golden Dawn system reach the Adeptus Minor grade, which has a lot of solar symbolism, and their ego inflates to a colossal size. They immediately start picking fights with everyone else because they’re convinced they are the enlightened ones, the ones who have received the true word of the Aeon or whatever they’re into. That's where you get the Aleister Crowleys and others who could be named, for whom it’s all about them. It's sad, but that's the other problem you get with the Golden Dawn. One of the reasons Dion Fortune, for example, and many of the other Golden Dawn offshoot orders, ditched certain aspects of the Golden Dawn degree rituals or grade rituals and rewrote or replaced them, was to take that risk down several notches.

Host: There's a book I'm fond of, which is just a question-and-answer session with a chap called Lord Pentland, who was a student of Gurdjieff—one of the more developed students, should we say. But every other answer he gives is pretty much, "I don't know, you'll have to find out for yourself." This brings up what you spoke about earlier. One might be mistaken in thinking that this process—especially with the notion of grades, which appeals to the very quantified Western mind— is about advancement or adding. But would you say that, through this process, what's actually more important is learning what to shed—what you've added that you need to get rid of? And that shedding is equally, if not more, important?

John Michael Greer: I don't know that it's more important, but it's certainly equally important. Also, Rudolf Steiner had a very important point, which is that one of the basic requirements for any kind of spiritual development is the ability to recognize that something is greater than you are. You have to have that capacity for respect, that capacity for adoration, for admiration. Because if you can't conceive of anything better than you are now, you cannot achieve anything better than you are now. That’s something I think a well-designed course of mystical training will always include—focusing on recognizing that you are not "all that and a bag of chips." Even when you have received the ornate, funny hat that makes you the Grand Panjandrum of the purple horde of the glimmering tower of Beh, or what have you, you are still just a human being. You may be a human being who knows a little more than some others and has some skills that others don't have, but you are not that big of a deal in the great scheme of things. So, relax and get off your high horse.

Host: So, what are grades, then?

John Michael Greer: Grades are very much like the grades in our public schools. In your public schools—if they're like our public schools—you have first grade, second grade, third grade, and so on, where each year is a year of study, and you're expected to master certain things during that process. Each grade has a ritual, which is the initiation ritual. The word "initiation" means beginning. It introduces you to certain symbols and energies that you'll be working with over the course of that grade. Most esoteric schools—not all, by any means, but most—have a series of grades that you work through, simply because it's a lot easier than dumping everything on you all at once.

Host: Do you think we need this as Westerners?

John Michael Greer: The thing is, the concept of grades isn't always part of Eastern systems. However, a lot of esoteric Buddhism, for example, divides training into various steps. You might be assigned to do a set of meditations for a year or for 108 days, study these texts, and then move on to another type of meditation. You'll begin working on uniting yourself with certain this bodhisattva, and so on. It's very much the same principle of working through a graded system of study, and I think that's almost essential whenever you're dealing with any complex body of lore and practice. If you want to become an electrical engineer, you start at the beginning, learn the basics, and then go step by step until you can actually do the work of an electrical engineer. It's the same kind of thing.

Host: Is there anything you'd like to add about the Magic Order of the Golden Dawn that you feel is key and that we haven't covered?

John Michael Greer: Let's see. Mostly, the thing about the Golden Dawn is that it's not the only game in town, though some of its members have tended to treat it as though it were. There are actually many different traditions of esoteric study and practice in the Western tradition. The Golden Dawn is certainly one of them, and it's certainly valid. It works, has enormous potential, and has to be taken seriously and done completely. One of the other things I've noticed is that people sometimes take up the Golden Dawn, study it for a couple of years, and then say, "Well, this isn't working." It's because they're only doing the parts that interest them—they're not doing it as a complete system. It is a complete system; you actually have to do the meditations and all the other work, or you're not going to get far. I've harped on this in some of my books, but really, it was an enormously useful system at the time. It was revolutionary when it first came out, revolutionary when the Regardie book was published in the late 1930s, and again when it was republished in the 1970s. There are other systems, and increasingly, we're getting more information on some of the systems from the same time, both earlier and later. For example, we're seeing a lot more interest in Martinism these days, as well as in some of the Central European systems. I think it's certainly an option—it's not the only game in town. I hope that eventually, maybe a century from now, there will be a new synthesis that includes the best elements of the Golden Dawn and the best elements of some of these other things.

Host: Well, that's what I was going to ask. Where do we see the Golden Dawn's influence today? It's hard to find a Western group that doesn't have at least some connection to it.

John Michael Greer: Although, that's less true now than it used to be. For a long time, it was the Golden Dawn or a focus through Dion Fortune, through Aleister Crowley, or through a few others like Paul Foster Case. Since Gerald Gardner was a student of Crowley, that influence was also passed on. However, we're increasingly seeing the emergence, on a larger scale, of traditions that have much less influence or, in some cases—like Martinism—no influence at all. These traditions came about at the same time but simply weren't part of that cultural milieu. I think it's a good thing because the Golden Dawn was really useful in its time; it still has a lot to teach, but it's not the only option. To answer your question more straightforwardly, I think that in the years to come, we'll see more people taking the Golden Dawn material and combining it with other teachings to create new syntheses. This will likely be the cutting-edge of magic for a while.

Host: Where do you advise people to begin with the Golden Dawn? I know you've written a three-book series, right?

John Michael Greer: Yes, basically. What I would advise is starting with a book I co-wrote with my late wife and another person called Learning Ritual Magic. It was intended to be a nine-month training program for a little magical group we ran at one point. It has remained in print since we published it because many people find it to be the best simple introduction to Golden Dawn magic on your own. So, Learning Ritual Magic is a good place to start. Then, if you want to go further, my books Paths of Wisdom and Circles of Power deal with the theory and practice of Golden Dawn magic. After that, you can move on to Israel Regardie's big book, and away you go. Keep in mind, though, that this is a 10- to 20-year project. To actually master the Golden Dawn work requires about as much effort as it takes to get a doctorate degree from a university.

Host: Okay, listeners, bear that in mind. But, as you mentioned before, one of your first teachers said—and I think it's the most important thing for anyone getting involved in this sort of thing—not only to understand that this will take 10, 20, or more years, but also to realize that the end isn't the focus. Otherwise, you'll just be disappointed.

John Michael Greer: Exactly. This is going to take you the rest of your life, but you have the rest of your life, so why not? If you feel drawn to this path and want to walk it, it has enormous benefits, and those benefits don't wait until you become the Grand Panjandrum of the Purple Tower or whatever.

Host: What are you working on now?

John Michael Greer: Let's see. I'm just finishing up a translation from Latin of one of John Dee's neglected books on astrological magic and astrology. I should say it's a translation with commentary because it badly needs commentary for modern readers. It needs a little more work, but John Dee has been an on-and-off interest of mine for a long time. I decided it was time to focus on it, partly because I do Latin translation the way some people do crosswords, and with some of the things going on in my life, I needed the relaxation. So, I worked on Propaedeumata Aphoristica - “Aphorisms on astrology and magic” - that's the working title I'm using. This neglected book, one of John Dee's first serious publications, actually gives important keys to his very famous book, the Monas Hieroglyphica, which have been completely neglected because people haven't paid attention to this earlier work. So, I'm doing a lot of work with John Dee right now.

Host: Okay, well, that seems like a good place to finish up. I'll be sure to put the links for your Golden Dawn books in the description below, along with your blog. John Michael Greer, once again, thanks very much.

John Michael Greer: Thank you very much for having me on.